HERES a no-brainer, brought to you by opinion columnist Donald Lambro.

The winner of the Republican presidential nomination will probably be the candidate who most embodies the core principles and beliefs of Ronald Reagan.

No kidding! You mean like lowering tax rates and facing up to the nations enemies foreign and domestic?

It turns out that the Republican presidential candidates are a bit slow at signing up for Ronald Reagans shining agenda. They have, at least, agreed to make President Bushs tax rate cuts permanent.

But the front-runners for their partys nod  Arizona Sen. John McCain and former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani  have sent mixed signals on the centerpiece of Reagans domestic agenda: tax-rate cuts to achieve maximum economic growth. While both have said President Bushs across-the-board income tax cuts should be made permanent before expiring in 2010, neither has signed the pledge signed by every Republican presidential nominee since 1988 promising not to raise the tax rates.

What planet are they on? The record of John McCain is especially troubling.

[He] was one of only two Republican senators who voted against the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and who voted against accelerating them in 2003. He abruptly flip-flopped last year, voting to extend some of the tax cuts, when he began actively running for president.

Heres what he said about the tax rate cuts.

I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us at the expense of middle-class Americans who need tax relief.

Oh really? But the presidents tax cuts were designed to reduce the taxes of middle-class Americans by a bigger percentage than the taxes of wealthier Americans. And the result of the presidents tax cuts is that the top 50 percent of income taxpayers pay 96 percent of all income taxes.

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists, she offered, smiling but meaning it.Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy. Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values

[The Axial Age] highlights the conception of a responsible self... [that] promise[s] man for the first time that he can understand the fundamental structure of reality and through salvation participate actively in it.Robert N Bellah, "Religious Evolution", American Sociological Review, Vol. 29, No. 3.

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Paul Dirac: When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated
by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that
I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion.
However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and
inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he
suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.John Farrell, The Creation Myth

Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...David Martin, On Secularization